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On Thugs

A little over a week ago, I stood on the 6th October Bridge and watched a skinny tough in civilian jeans emerge from a knot of riot police and throw rocks at Coptic Christian protesters in front of the Maspero building, which houses state TV. Friends of mine in the crowd told me they’d been harassed by groups of thugs demanding, “Are you Christian or Muslim?” That night, the Army fired on protesters, and others were run over by police vans and armored cars, leaving twenty-four dead. When I went the next morning to observe the aftermath, a group of perhaps twenty riot police manned the concrete meridian in the middle of the road. Opposite them, a couple of hundred men of indeterminate age milled about. Among the cars I saw two men, separately, dressed in civilian clothes, jeans, and T-shirts, carrying police riot helmets and shields. One casually swung a long baton.

Recently, Tahrir, a post-revolution newspaper—independent and widely read—published a story sourced from documents it had obtained from the Amn Dawla, State Security, about the existence of a unit called the Department of Dealing with Civilians. The documents indicated that the Awn Dawla had a hundred and sixty-five thousand thugs on its payroll throughout the country, roughly half of whom had criminal records. They included memoranda between the head of the department, Brigadier General Ali Galal and General Hassan Abdel Rahman, the head of the State Security (now in prison awaiting trial for conspiring to kill civilians during the revolution, by ordering live fire on demonstrators; he has pleaded not guilty), which apparently detailed a new system for tracking, contacting and recruiting these thugs. They noted that the men were to be specifically exempt from prosecution during the period of the last (heavily intimidated and rigged) parliamentary elections in November and December, 2010.

When Mubarak fell, his regime remained in place. A few corrupt businessmen around his son and heir apparent, Gamal, were imprisoned on corruption charges; a handful of top officials from the police and the security services are on trial along with Mubarak. Some provincial governors were replaced with former generals and military men of a similar ilk; the Prime Minister and Cabinet were also largely drawn from a pool of characters who had already served in government at some point. State Security, feared and loathed for its surveillance of ordinary Egyptians—especially those working in state institutions—and of dissidents and activists, was renamed National Security. A few officers were let go, a few were shuffled into different jobs, but the edifice remains essentially intact. And increasingly, it appears that its old tactics—seeding demonstrations with agent provocateurs, riling mobs to defend state institutions, deliberately spreading disruption, confusion, and sectarianism—are still in use, too. Thugs have also been implicated in the church bombing in Alexandria in January.

Thugs in Egypt are not just generic belligerent tough guys; they are paid enforcers. Being a thug is a job—even, for some, a profession. Their ubiquity is part of the legacy of the Mubarak regime, which used them to intimidate independent candidates at elections. They are also used by ordinary people for enforcing property law and business deals when the swamp and intricate corruption of the endlessly slow judicial process fails them.

A friend of mine hired thugs, for example, when her aunts broke in and took over her apartment while she was evacuated during the revolution. She returned to find that they had tried to install an African diplomat as a tenant. She hired the thugs to stop him moving in. (Residence is nine tenths of the law wherever you are, it seems.) “The funny thing was, my thugs knew my aunts’ thugs,” she told me. “ ‘Oh, we’ll sort this out with the boss,’ they said. And they did!”

I recently got to know a part-time thug. Sami (not his real name) admits sometimes he has provided what he considers protection services for people who have disputes over an apartment or a shop. He lives in Shobra, a big working-class neighborhood near the center of Cairo, in an old tumbledown house on an alley. Sami is part of a big family in the area; everyone knows them. The walls of the house are covered in suras from the Koran and leftover pro-Mubarak declarations. Three of his older brothers live in apartments off an open-air stairwell that leads up to a trash-strewn roof where a few ducks live. The eldest, who used to have a tourist-bus business, is known locally as “the Fixer.” Sami took me to a street wedding a few days ago: his cousin was marrying an air-conditioning engineer. There were strings of colored lights, a drummer and a d.j., stacks of speakers. The women were at one end, dancing to Araby pop. The young men clapped around a circle, lighting aerosol flares and dancing. Sami fired off a few celebratory cartridges from his homemade gun, a welded metal affair made in a local basement.

Sami had gone down to Tahrir on the Day of the Camels to defend the regime—he says he was not paid, but responded to a call for citizens to protect the government from the foreigners and agents—but when he got there he was appalled at what he saw: “Egyptians fighting Egyptians.” He claimed that he had immediately joined the revolution’s side.

I asked Sami what he thought about the violence at Maspiro against the Copts. The Copts had started their march from Shobra, which is a mixed neighborhood; many of the families who live around Sami are Christians. “It was terrible, they were protesting peacefully; they didn’t deserve any of that,” Sami said. (I was surprised. In other conversations with ordinary Cairenes, I had often found people cleaving to the official line, that the Copts had attacked the Army and that whatever happened might be regrettable, but what could you expect?)

“How were things in Shobra?” I asked.

“Nothing happened here,” Sami said. “We all formed committees to block the streets, and there was no trouble.”